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I have no spurTo prick the sides of my intent, but onlyVaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself,And falls on th’other. …— William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Queen Elizabeth II wore pink. Pink outfit, pink hat, pink handbag. Maggie Trudeau looked lovely in something that must have been inspired by the 1920s. Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa looked taut as a guitar string, as though he expected the entire stadium to blow up at any moment — and he probably did.

International Olympic Committee president Lord Killanin, seated next to the queen, seemed relatively relaxed for a man in charge of an Olympiad that was such a near-run thing.

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip arrive for the opening ceremony of the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, July 17, 1976. Applauding at bottom right are then-Quebec premier Robert Bourassa and then-mayor Jean Drapeau. To the queen’s right is Lord Killanin, who was president of the International Olympic Committee. HAYES/Canadian Press

And the man behind it all? The man whose vaulting ambition had made the 1976 Olympics happen, including the $1.6 billion in debt that loomed for the hosts of the XXIst Olympiad? Mayor Jean Drapeau was seated discreetly off to the side, away from the royals and the rest — as though all of it, the good, the bad and the ugly, were not in some way his responsibility.

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At the opening ceremony to the Montreal Olympics 40 years ago Sunday, nothing, typically, was quite as it seemed. When the cameras panned the impressive overhang at the Olympic Stadium, the commentators didn’t mention that the retractable roof itself was missing, along with the ambitious tower from which it was supposed to have been suspended, or that the Velodrome next door had been finished in June, two years behind schedule.

There was no discussion of Roger Taillibert, the French architect who designed the stadium and was fired eight months earlier, when the provincial government took over and created the Olympics Installations Board (OIB) to oversee the work. (Taillibert, who before Montreal was known for working with a tight, well-organized team that brought projects in on time and under budget, insists to this day that the debacle could have been avoided had he been left in complete charge from the beginning — and he may be right.)

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And, of course, no one mentioned that the mere presence of the queen herself was in itself a source of controversy. Bourassa, the Liberal premier, mindful of the violence that had accompanied the queen’s visit to Quebec City in October 1964, had begged Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau not to invite her. Trudeau, unflappable as ever, refused. The queen, showing considerable courage herself, attended and read the statement — in more than passable French — declaring the Games open.

Drapeau’s public role was confined to accepting the flag of the previous, tragic Olympics from the mayor of Munich. But in the entire history of the modern Olympic movement, it’s unlikely that you will find another Olympiad that was so entirely the product of one man’s sometimes fevered imagination. The 1976 Olympics were Jean Drapeau’s baby from the first bid to the final, billion-dollar bill.

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Drapeau’s supporters will say that without him, there would have been no Olympics. His detractors will point out that without Drapeau, the Olympics would not have become a corruption-riddled debacle that would drain the city’s finances for decades.

Both sides are right: No Drapeau, no Games. No Drapeau, no debt.

How could one man be responsible for so much? In a memoir left by former IOC technical director Artur Takac, who had to work with Drapeau to prepare the Games, there is an anecdote that reveals much about the method and the madness of the mayor. Takac, a tough Yugoslavian who had been a PoW during the Second World War, had encountered the irresistible force.

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“I found Drapeau persistent to the point of aggressiveness; once he was locked into an idea or a project, you needed a crowbar to lever his mind from the goal.”

In May 1970, Montreal office workers express the mood of the city at the news that the 1976 Summer Olympics has been awarded to us. ADRIAN LUNNY/Gazette files

Takac found out the hard way how difficult Drapeau could be. Shortly after Montreal was awarded the 1976 Games, the mayor flew to Switzerland to meet with Takac. Over dinner at the Lausanne Palace Hotel on March 20, 1971 (10 months after Montreal won the right to host the Games) Drapeau delivered his first order to Takac:

“Tomorrow evening we are both flying to Paris, where you are going to meet Roger Taillibert, an architect who designed the Parc des Princes in Paris … and who will now start to design our main Olympic venues in Montreal.”

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Takac was taken aback, “astonished that Drapeau should believe that he could command me to drop everything at the snap of his fingers.” He protested. The next morning, he had a meeting scheduled with Lord Killanin, then an IOC vice-president. Drapeau waved his protests away.

“Here is your air ticket and I shall wait for you at the Geneva airport,” Drapeau said. And that was it: the following evening, Takac found himself sitting with Drapeau in Taillibert’s office in Paris. His role was to explain to Taillibert all the details that an Olympic structure entailed. Drapeau had not yet announced that Taillibert was to be the architect because he wanted the commission to be a fait accompli when it was announced back in Montreal, where Canadian architects were sure to object. The meetings with Taillibert went on most of that night and the next two days; Killanin was kept waiting.

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That was Drapeau: unwilling to listen to critics or acknowledge obstacles, more than capable of treating high IOC officials like underlings paid to do his bidding.

Lord Killanin, in a chapter of his own memoir titled Oh God, Oh Montreal, wrote: “I don’t know whether Montreal or Moscow was more damaging to the Olympic concept, but my wife believes that the coronary I suffered in 1977 was partly due to the increasing burden of problems I had during 1975 and 1976.”

When he met with Takac and Taillibert in Paris, Drapeau was about to give the entire city of Montreal a coronary. By keeping everything in his own hands, Drapeau delayed the start of construction. By delaying, he played into the hands of Quebec’s militant unions, which were shrewd enough to recognize that they had the man at their mercy. In May 1975, with construction already behind schedule, the unions walked out. They did not return to work until October, nine months before the opening ceremony.

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It soon became apparent that with time growing short, Taillibert’s design could not be executed — at least not in the way he intended. What was supposed to be a self-financing Olympics quickly spiralled out of control.

“The Olympics can no more run a deficit than a man can have a baby,” Drapeau had said. With the debt mounting, The Gazette’s Aislin was ready with his timeless cartoon, showing a very pregnant mayor on the phone: ” ‘Ello, Morgentaler?” in a reference to abortion-rights crusader Henry Morgentaler.

It is not hard to understand why Drapeau thought he could pull it off. Expo 67, the world’s fair nine years earlier, had been a spectacular success. By the time he brought the Major League Baseball Expos to town to begin play in 1969, it seemed that Drapeau could walk on water — until he went under and took Montreal down with him, leaving a city with a 1976 population of just over 1 million with an Olympic debt of $1.6 billion.

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The final cost of the Games would come in a staggering 13 times the original estimate because of incompetence, inflation, fraud, kickbacks, horrid weather, security concerns and militant unions. It was not all Drapeau’s fault but the blame, deservedly, given the power he wielded at the time, would attach almost entirely to him.

Had the province not intervened to create the Olympic Installations Board, it’s conceivable that the Montreal Olympics might not have come off at all. But the OIB itself was to become a self-sustaining bureaucracy, one that is still dreaming up ways to spend still more taxpayers’ money on the Big Owe 40 years later.

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It’s not as though Montreal got nothing in return for its Olympic investment. The rather vague factor of international recognition aside, there were more tangible and lasting benefits. As former IOC vice-president Richard Pound points out, a great deal of infrastructure work was also done, including a métro extension to bring fans from downtown to the Olympic Stadium.

In addition to the Big O itself, other facilities remain, especially Complexe sportif Claude-Robillard in the city’s north end, a bustling, effective multi-sport complex where athletes can train in a variety of disciplines. And the Olympic Velodrome was converted into today’s Biodome, a prime city attraction.

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But the money squandered on the 1976 Olympics could have been spent in dozens of more effective ways, including a modest downtown ballpark that might have kept the Expos here to this day.

***

As they have at every precariously held Olympics, the athletes would bail Montreal out of the mess it was in on the eve of the Games. More than 30 African nations boycotted the Montreal Olympics because New Zealand, which was participating, had sent its rugby team to tour South Africa, which was still enduring the horrors of apartheid.

Aislin: We embraced many of the Olympians as if they were our very own, in particular the tiny Nadia Comaneci and gargantuan Vasily Alekseyev.Terry (Aislin) Mosher/Montreal Gazette

Still there were 6,084 athletes (4,824 men, 1,260 women) from 92 nations competing in 21 sports in Montreal, and a handful of them produced performances for the ages, beginning with tiny Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci and gargantuan Soviet weightlifter Vasily Alekseyev. American decathlete and relentless publicity hound Bruce Jenner led the Olympics in a new event — the race to turn Olympic gold into cold, hard cash. A superb collection of American and Cuban boxers strutted their stuff at the Forum and Finnish distance runner Lasse Viren repeated his double gold medal in the 5,000 and 10,000 metres at the Munich Olympics.

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Viren was also a new kind of athlete, one dogged by rumours of blood doping. The process was legal at the time and in any case Viren, a small-town postal worker who was to become a successful politician in Finland, never admitted it.

Far more serious was the first major doping scandal of the Olympic movement, the case of the East German female swimmers, teenage girls who were turned into virtual lab rats by the state. There were suspicions in 1976, but it would take decades for the truth about the extent of East German doping and its horrific effects on those women to become known.

Because the final debt was so suffocating and the run-up to the opening ceremony so fraught with stories of cost overruns, mismanagement, greed and the possibility that the Montreal Olympics might not come off at all, there is a popular misconception that the whole thing was a catastrophe. That is simply not true. I have covered seven Olympic Games and lived through an eighth, and once the construction workers with their brooms and shovels had cleared a path for the athletes to enter the stadium, Montreal put on a good show.

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For the most part, the buses ran on time, the crowds showed up, the volunteers were friendly, the venues functioned as they were meant to function. There were complaints over the fact that the city had been turned into an armed camp in the wake of the tragedy at Munich, but Montreal lived up to its reputation as a party town and for that single fortnight, the debt and the acrimony were forgotten and it all went pretty much as planned.

It would be another 20 years before the Dogpatch Olympics in Atlanta would show the world what a truly awful Games was like. The broken-down buses were late when they ran at all, the computers didn’t work, the volunteers were friendly but as ignorant as tree stumps and the Americans got the spirit of the Olympics all wrong, treating guests from all over the world like lovable losers, invited merely to provide an exotic background and expected to lose on cue.

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That was why, when Canada’s 4-x-100-metre men’s relay team sizzled to gold ahead of the U.S. on the last day of competition in Atlanta, a thousand journalists from all over the world stood in the main press centre to cheer on Donovan Bailey as he crossed the line.

***

High jumper Greg Joy, right, carries the Canadian flag at the closing ceremony of the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. Joy won a silver medal, Canada’s highest medal performance.Tedd Church/Gazette files

Canada didn’t do much winning in Montreal in 1976. In fact, we became the first nation to host an Olympiad without taking a single gold medal, a feat we would repeat in Calgary 12 years later. Much of our joy came from Grey Joy, who took a silver medal in the high jump in what would be Canada’s best performance.

But Montreal got the spirit of the thing right. We dug deep, maxed out all our credit cards and a few we didn’t have, said goodbye to the world after the closing ceremony on Aug. 1 and went home to mutter into our stubbies about our crazy little mayor and the mess he got us into.

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A little more than three months later came the second part of the double whammy that would affect Montreal financially for decades — the election of the Parti Québécois government of René Lévesque on Nov. 15, 1976. Sun Life led the pell-mell anglophone flight down the 401 to Toronto. Whether you blame francophone anger or anglo hysteria, the effect was undeniable: a city swimming in Olympic debt lost a significant part of its tax base.

“Let Toronto become Milan,” Drapeau said rather grandly. “Montreal will always be Rome.”

Jean Drapeau at the Commission of Inquiry into the Cost of Installations of Games of the 21st Olympiad, headed by Judge Albert Malouf between 1977 and 1980. /Gazette files

It is a measure of Drapeau’s grip on the city that in spite of the Olympic debacle, he wasn’t immediately thrown out of office. Despite the critics on every side and the 1980 release of the 908-page Malouf Report detailing corruption and Drapeau’s personal incompetence in the staging of the Olympics, Drapeau would survive in power another decade until, slowed by a stroke, he announced his retirement in 1986.

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The abstemious Drapeau himself was never suspected of corruption, although he did turn a blind eye to the system of kickbacks going on all around him. The Malouf Report singled out in particular Drapeau’s right-hand man, Gérard Niding, who accepted a house built for him in the Eastern Townships by contractor Régis Trudeau in exchange for an untendered contract. Niding, Trudeau and OIB head Claude Rouleau would each serve one day in jail for their transgressions, which perhaps partly explains why the kickback system has persisted.

Like Drapeau himself, Montreal would survive, despite the Olympic debt and the long-term economic effects of the sovereignty movement. We are no longer Canada’s first city — but we still throw the best party.

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